President Biden spoke further on the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe v. Wade, saying it concerns him “a great deal.”
“It doesn’t represent who’s going to vote for it yet. I hope there are not enough votes for it,” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
“The idea that concerns me a great deal that we’re going to after 50 years decide a woman does not have a right to choose within the limits of a Supreme Court decision … But even more, equally as profound, is the rationale used, and it would mean that every other decision made in the notion of privacy is thrown into question,” he said.
According to the draft document, the Court found there’s no inherent right to abortion because it is not covered under privacy protections derived from the Constitution.
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito wrote. He said that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start” and that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”
Biden said “a whole range of rights” would be questioned if the draft reflects a final opinion, he said.
“And the idea we’re letting the states make those decisions … would be a fundamental shift in what we’ve done. So it goes far beyond, in my view — if it becomes a law and if what is written is what remains, it goes far beyond the concern of whether or not there is the right to choose. It goes to other basic rights: the right to marry, the right to determine a whole range of things, because one of the issues that this court and many members of the court, or a number of members of the court, have not acknowledged that there is a right to privacy in our Constitution. I strongly believe there is,” he said.
“If this decision holds, it’s really quite a radical decision,” Biden added.
“It basically says all the decisions relating to your private life, who you marry, whether or not you decide to conceive a child or not, whether or not you can have an abortion, a range of other decisions,” he said. “… It’s a fundamental shift in American jurisprudence.”
When asked if he would do away with the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade, Biden said “I’m not prepared to make those judgments now … but you know, I think the codification of Roe makes a lot of sense.”
See Biden reaction to Roe v. Wade draft: